Cool Startup: Brevity

Brevity Ventures was founded in January 2010 and has received $8.7M in venture funding. It’s HQ is in Burbank, with another office in New York city. They are a cloud-based media platform that caters to the needs of studios and post production facilities. Brevity is part of a trio of digital media platforms that helps studios and post production facilities improve their workflows, and deliver uncompressed media files over long distances, to streamline the video production process.

The two other providers are MediaSilo and Aframe. MediaSilo and Aframe have a platform that ingest video, stores it, tags it, and is similar to an OVP. On the other hand, Brevity is focused more on the transcoding and file deliver service. However, all three target the same type of customer.

CDNs assist clients downstream their video content; Brevity assist with upstream and downstream. The upstream part of the process is more complex than downstream, because media files can’t be compressed like regular http objects using Gzip.

In the post production industry, editors work on the same file in different locations, modifying elements like coloring, adding VFx, sound, and so on. The most popular formats in the video production process are ProRes, DNX, H.264, and MPEG. A high speed FTP services based on UDP or Multi-TCP is needed to shorten the upload times to the platforms, reducing upload time from many hours to minutes. Aspera and Signiant are the two leaders in this segment.

Brevity’s customers include NBC Sports and Deluxe. The team behind Brevity has a strong background working in the post production and film industry. I expect them to make an impact in this market over the next couple of years.